English Literature

Neoclassicism
Classicism is basically a reference to Classical authors and artists, namely the ancient Greeks and Romans.(Hill)As the name connotes, Neoclassicism is derived from the previous works of the Classicists.

Neoclassic works tend to use the recurring theme of religion, specifically the Roman Catholic Church. It is obvious since the influence of the church is pervasive in the late 18th century and thus literary works also carried this influence as evident in works of art and literature. Although it centralizes on form and style, neoclassic literature can also depict vivid emotions. We can see from Alexander Popes work entitled An Essay on Man how the writer encapsulated the emotions of dying within 4 stanzas.
Alexander Popes An Essay on ManA simple child, That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every limb, What should it know of death

From the last two lines we can see a very strong differentiation of life and death. The good thing about neoclassic literature is that the plot of the literary text is always tied to some celestial being. For this particular essay, there were multiple references to God and how he supervises the whole world with his omniscience.

Romanticism
Romanticism was a 19th-century reaction against Classicism and against tradition.(Hill) It is more of breaking free from the stringent norms of the Classicists.

When we speak of romance, what people think of in an instant is a male and a female who are in love with each other. But romanticism is different from this idea. This does not mean that all literary works written by romanticists are about a lovely tale between a man and a woman. At times, it can be an emotion-filled story about an endearing place or item. And it does not always end happily. As with tragedies, it may take the form of a romance story but still end dreadfully.

William Blakes the Garden of Love
The Garden of Love has the hints of being created by a romanticist poet. In the poem, there was a character named Love which acted like a personified emotion. It seems like a paradise as the author phrases it but the ending was anticlimactic. But it was refreshing in the sense that it did not end in a fairy tale way like how other romanticist poets end their works.

The title gives a very strong contrast with this last stanza but it brings out the true essence of The Garden of Love for the author. Look at how he described the garden which was supposedly a beautiful place as he visualized his childhood in that place

And I saw it was filled with graves, And tombstones where flowers should be And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, And binding with briars my joys and desires.William Wadsworths Intimations Ode And lastly, the Intimations Ode, which is of Romantic genre as well, portrays how Romanticism can be used to describe the joys of a curious child. There are a lot of subjects that can be described using Romanticism, and this is but one of them. In fact, Intimations Ode does give the Romanticists a reason to believe that their genre is indeed unbound by any measures. The free flowing prose allows a writer to freely express his thoughts on a subject without thinking much about it conforming to his genre or writing style.Choosing between Romanticism and Neoclassicism
If I were to choose between Romanticism and Classicism, I would prefer Romanticism as it gives the author a vast creative horizon which revolves on not only one kind of love but an infinite number of relations. Its limitations are transformed into new ways to become creative and to look for new subjects which still utilizes the romantic genre. This was probably due to the Romanticists preference for using imagination in their literary works. The imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind. This contrasted distinctly with the traditional arguments for the supremacy of reason.(A Guide to the Study of Literature A Companion Text for Core Studies 6, Landmarks of Literature)

Also, Romanticism emerged as a response to Classicism (Classicism and Romanticism) which furthers the belief that Classicism indeed was lacking in one way or another and that a different literary genre was needed to fill in this gap. In Romanticism, the authors can express their views and emotions without having to conform to a specific style of writing. Unlike in Classicism where rigid and stern structure, the romanticists thought of the world as a place to express their ideas and believes.(Classicism and Romanticism)